Book Discussion: Possessing Harriet, a play by Kyle Bass
Wed, Aug 24, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Get Woke! Catskills presents an in-person discussion of the play Possessing Harriet by Kyle Bass on Wed. August 3 at 6 pm, Bushel Collective. Order a copy of Possessing Harriet at  https://standingstonebooks.net/product-page/possesing-harriet

PLAY DESCRIPTION. In 1839, Harriet Powell, a young, mixed-race, enslaved woman, slips away from a hotel in Syracuse, New York, and escapes from the white Southerner who owns her. With the aid of a worker at the hotel, a mysterious free black man named Thomas Leonard, Harriet finds temporary safe harbor in an attic room at the home of impassioned abolitionist Gerrit Smith. With the slave catchers in pursuit, Harriet spends the hours before her nighttime departure on the dangerous journey to Canada in the company of Smith’s young cousin Elizabeth Cady, an outspoken advocate for women’s equality. Confronted with new and difficult ideas about race, identity, and equality, and with confusion, fear, and desperation multiplying, Harriet is forced to the precipice of radical self-re-imagining and a reckoning with the heartrending cost of her freedom.